Gavin Chipper wrote:People who write to Susie Dent to ask about the origin of some word or saying, when they could just Google it. (If these people really exist and aren't made up by the show.)

Frak. Apparently, I am officially Not To Be Trusted.

Unlucky. OK, I'll allow that such people are to be trusted if they write in just to see if they can get their question read out on television, as long as they do not do so in as a genuine pursuit of information (unless as just a secondary means) - i.e. they still just Google it themselves anyway.

Gavin Chipper wrote:People who write to Susie Dent to ask about the origin of some word or saying, when they could just Google it. (If these people really exist and aren't made up by the show.)

Frak. Apparently, I am officially Not To Be Trusted.

Unlucky. OK, I'll allow that such people are to be trusted if they write in just to see if they can get their question read out on television, as long as they do not do so in as a genuine pursuit of information (unless as just a secondary means) - i.e. they still just Google it themselves anyway.

People who arbitrarily change the rules and add caveats just so they don't offend people they want to appear nice to.

I mean, what's the purpose of changing it? When people pass away, they die. Do we not just substitute "passed away" for "died" when we hear it? I think so, in which case, why do the first substitution? Just say it. Don't be afraid of death. It's the most normal thing going.

Eoin Monaghan wrote:
He may not be liked on here, but you have to give some credit to Mark

There are countless equivalent examples too, and it all depends on circumstance and knowing your audience. Essentially I get what you're saying but I disagree that it's never appropriate to pussyfoot around certain things. But then I am a big girl's blouse.

Marc Meakin wrote:I'm guessing that you haven't lost anyone close recently.

Why would that make a difference? A family member of mine died quite recently, and I still felt no need to descent into euphemism to soften the fact that he karked it at an undue age. Does using phrases like 'passed away', or the laughable 'fell asleep' make anyone feel better about things?

I worry about the poor bastards who got buried because they simply fell asleep.

You and Ian are both saying "don't use 'passed away' with me, say what you mean" which is totally and utterly fine. But I bet you both know _other_ people who wouldn't appreciate the kind of bluntness you're advocating, and not trusting people purely based on their attempts to make something a little less harsh seems weird; even if you disagree with them doing it, I can't see how their reasons to do so are untrustworthy.

Matt Morrison wrote:You and Ian are both saying "don't use 'passed away' with me, say what you mean" which is totally and utterly fine. But I bet you both know _other_ people who wouldn't appreciate the kind of bluntness you're advocating, and not trusting people purely based on their attempts to make something a little less harsh seems weird; even if you disagree with them doing it, I can't see how their reasons to do so are untrustworthy.

I understand it, I didn't lump in on the non-trust side of things though. If I was talking to someone who was upset about a death, I'd be gentle and understanding as appropriate, but I'd be surprised if I ended up using a euphemism. I'd probably just talk about something else if they were that sensitive.

Matt Morrison wrote:You and Ian are both saying "don't use 'passed away' with me, say what you mean" which is totally and utterly fine. But I bet you both know _other_ people who wouldn't appreciate the kind of bluntness you're advocating, and not trusting people purely based on their attempts to make something a little less harsh seems weird; even if you disagree with them doing it, I can't see how their reasons to do so are untrustworthy.

People who use enclosing punctuation marks or all capitals for emphasis in online contexts where bold, italic and underline are available.

Matt Morrison wrote:even if you disagree with them doing it, I can't see how their reasons to do so are untrustworthy.

When I started this thread, the whole trust thing wasn't meant to be taken literally. It was supposed to be more of a humorous thing. Just "people who do wrong stuff" really.

Yeah, this is pretty much where I was with it too. It's not as though if someone said "passed away" I would refuse to entrust my dog with them. I think it's a bit odd and unnecessary and speaks to a fear of death that is probably unhealthy, but I wouldn't actively distrust them.

Eoin Monaghan wrote:
He may not be liked on here, but you have to give some credit to Mark

At least "passed away" means "died", and everyone understands it. There was an item on the Liverpool FC website a couple of years ago, the day after Yaya Toure had had a dreadful game in the World Cup, expressing their sympathies to Kolo Toure on the passing of his brother. Turned out it was another brother, who had died.

The one that aggravates me is the universal way that the media will report "Tributes were being paid to X, who died today" which implies that the news story is the tributes. Do they think it somehow softens the blow, when the actual news is "X died today". Particularly when it's your local paper, and the tributes amount to his mother saying he was lovely, and his headmaster who clearly can't exactly remember which one he was.

People who say to me when I swear something along the lines of "I don't think I've ever heard you swear before. You don't seem like the sort of person who would swear." You'd be surprised how many people have actually said this to me over my life. I find it a really odd thing to even go through someone's mind. Cunts.

Gavin Chipper wrote:People who say to me when I swear something along the lines of "I don't think I've ever heard you swear before. You don't seem like the sort of person who would swear." You'd be surprised how many people have actually said this to me over my life. I find it a really odd thing to even go through someone's mind. Cunts.

My theory is that it means that you - in normal conversation - swear appropriately, i.e. only when the situation demands it to, for instance, reinforce a point. This distinguishes you from people who swear every other word. But then excessive and unnecessary use of swearing can be funny too.

I of course have mastered both techniques (but employ them in an entirely inappropriate manner).

Gavin Chipper wrote:People who think the word "literally" is off limits when you're exaggerating. As if saying "I literally died laughing" is any more inaccurate than saying "I died laughing".

Agreed. In my opinion, "literally" has a legitimate figurative use.

You're both literally wrong. Literally has (or should have*) a very specific function of distinguishing a statement from figurative, hyperbolic, ironic or metaphorical statements. Just because it is widely misused doesn't mean it should be ok to widely misuse it.

*I see the OED has bowed to the stupidity of the general public by including a non-literal definition of literally....
1.1 (informal) Used for emphasis while not being literally true

Gavin Chipper wrote:People who think the word "literally" is off limits when you're exaggerating. As if saying "I literally died laughing" is any more inaccurate than saying "I died laughing".

Agreed. In my opinion, "literally" has a legitimate figurative use.

You're both literally wrong. Literally has (or should have*) a very specific function of distinguishing a statement from figurative, hyperbolic, ironic or metaphorical statements. Just because it is widely misused doesn't mean it should be ok to widely misuse it.

*I see the OED has bowed to the stupidity of the general public by including a non-literal definition of literally....
1.1 (informal) Used for emphasis while not being literally true

The word "literally" doesn't have to be used literally any more than the word "hoarsely" has to be used "hoarsely". It's an error of levels or something to say otherwise. When you use the word "literally", it applies to what you are saying after the word "literally", not the word itself. And the word "literally" is just a word like any other in the English language, which can be used for exaggeration or figuratively.

But if I was writing the dictionary, I might not bother with the informal sense. The point is that there is literally nothing special about the word. It can be used figuratively, but so can any other word. There example here is "I have received literally thousands of letters", but you could also say "I have received thousands of letters", in which case you'd be using the word "thousands" figuratively", but I don't think this needs to be mentioned in the dictionary entry for "thousands".

Gavin Chipper wrote:
When you use the word "literally", it applies to what you are saying after the word "literally", not the word itself.

Agreed. And it defines what follows as being in a literal, actual, non-figurative sense.

Certainly you can state "I have received thousands of letters" and everyone would understand that you mean you have received loads of letters. But if you say you have "literally received thousands of letters" that should means you have received at least 2,000 letters. The whole point of the word literally is to denote the fact the fact that you have in a literal sense received thousands of letters.... you're saying "I'm not speaking figuratively here, I have actually received multiples of a thousand letters"

Gavin Chipper wrote:I see the OED has bowed to the stupidity of the general public by including a non-literal definition of literally....
1.1 (informal) Used for emphasis while not being literally true

Nice circular definition there. I'd say defining a word by using the word itself is a bad idea.

Especially so if a word is defined by the word itself preceded by "not"!

Gavin Chipper wrote:I see the OED has bowed to the stupidity of the general public by including a non-literal definition of literally....
1.1 (informal) Used for emphasis while not being literally true

Nice circular definition there. I'd say defining a word by using the word itself is a bad idea.

People who think that a scale from 1 to 10 is the same as a score out of 10. In fact, people who ask you to rate something on a scale from 1 to 10. Why 1 to 10? Why not 15 to 71? 0 has to got to be the zero point!

But it's not always 1 to 10, is it? Sometimes 0 is an option, so 0 to 10 (or eleven ranks). Depends on how the question is termed. I think you sometimes assume that people are less rigorous than you, when the case may be that they are in fact more rigorous.

But it's not always 1 to 10, is it? Sometimes 0 is an option, so 0 to 10 (or eleven ranks). Depends on how the question is termed. I think you sometimes assume that people are less rigorous than you, when the case may be that they are in fact more rigorous.

Sometimes it is an option, and the people who give you a 0 to 10 scale can be trusted. But 1 to 10 is very common.

Why? One is the first number of the counting, and is somewhat more venerable than its upstart neighbour zero.

I just think it's odd to have a scale from 1 to 10. It's confusing for one thing. People might give a score of 5 thinking it's the middle, when actually it's equivalent to 4 out of 9. 5.5 would actually be the middle score. I'd be surprised if many people actually properly took into account this asymmetry when giving their score. It's also the same as saying "Add one to your score out of 9". Absolutely stone-cold mental, I genuinely can't see any other description that applies.

If it's 0 to 10 then it's the same as 0 to 100 but with everything divided by 10. But comparing a 1 to 10 scale with a 1 to 100 scale doesn't work as nicely.

On The Last Leg, Jeremy Corbyn was asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how much "in" he was with the EU. This was later misreported on the news as his score out of 10 rather than his score out of 9, plus 1.

Why? One is the first number of the counting, and is somewhat more venerable than its upstart neighbour zero.

I just think it's odd to have a scale from 1 to 10. It's confusing for one thing. People might give a score of thinking it's the middle, when actually it's equivalent to 4 out of 9. 5.5 would actually be the middle score. I'd be surprised if many people actually properly took into account this asymmetry when giving their score. It's also the same as saying "Add one to your score out of 9". Absolutely stone-cold mental, I genuinely can't see any other description that applies.

On a sort of related (not really) aside, all our A-Level mock examinations had a maximum score of 100, i.e. if you answered everything correctly you would score 100. All of them except in Maths that is, for some reason the mock exams always had a maximum of 114, or 109, or 112, or some other seemingly-random figure between 100 and 120. Can anyone confirm if they can recall such a weird system? Maybe it still goes on, who knows.

Jim Bentley wrote:
On a sort of related (not really) aside, all our A-Level mock examinations had a maximum score of 100, i.e. if you answered everything correctly you would score 100. All of them except in Maths that is, for some reason the mock exams always had a maximum of 114, or 109, or 112, or some other seemingly-random figure between 100 and 120. Can anyone confirm if they can recall such a weird system? Maybe it still goes on, who knows.

In our maths exam, each question was worth a number of marks for a correct answer, and the individual totals were scaled to make the best 100. On one occasion, after this had been done, it was found that I'd not been credited for an answer, so rather than change everybody's by rescaling, the master decided to keep the factor he'd used, so I ended with 102%